The Girl Below (16 page)

My room was small but cozy, with bare floorboards and a window that looked out over the garden. It was furnished with a single bed, a chair, and a desk with drawers, but I liked the austerity. Compared to Peggy’s, the room verged on hospital clean and I looked forward to settling in, to sleeping well in the chaste narrow bed.

“There’s a wardrobe,” said Pippa, opening it. “But I’m afraid it isn’t completely empty. Some of my old junk is in there—a few boxes and clothes I can’t bear to get rid of.” The boxes were old tea chests like the ones my parents had stored stuff in, the same logo stenciled on the side. Pippa took out an armful of garments to make room for mine and I realized she was as much of a hoarder as Peggy. After taking out the clothes, she couldn’t shut the closet door; it didn’t seem to fit properly in its frame. “One more thing,” she said, pointing to a small door I hadn’t noticed when we came into the room. “The attic bathroom, used by his lordship, who is not the tidiest or most considerate person in the world.”

She opened the door and we looked into the tiny bathroom at a cramped shower stall, toilet, and miniature sink, then through an open door to the space beyond, where Caleb was sprawled on his bed, punishing an air guitar in front of a blaring stereo. He was really getting into it, contorting his face with heavy-metal menace.

When Caleb saw us staring at him, he hurled himself off the bed. “Fucking retards!” he yelled, slamming his body into the door to shut it. “Fuck off! Fuck you!”

Pippa flinched at the abuse, but she couldn’t help smiling, and even though I could tell Caleb was mortified, I laughed too. “You’ll have to work out some kind of system,” she said. “Or use the bathroom downstairs.”

“There’s no lock?”

“Caleb shut himself in there one day about a year ago and refused to go to school, so we had it taken out.” She lowered her voice, conspiratorially. “He’s not exactly thrilled about sharing his floor with anyone, but he’ll get over it. He’s really such a sweetheart once you get to know him.”

I wondered how that was ever going to happen.

Later on, after supper, I unpacked my suitcases, lined up the few books I had along the narrow windowsill, and tried to hang my clothes in what remained of the closet. Caleb came through to tell me we should keep our respective bathroom doors closed at all times, and that I should always knock before I went into the bathroom, even if I thought no one was in there.

“Suits me,” I said, and waited for him to skulk back to his bedroom, but instead he hovered in the doorway. “You can come in,” I said, eventually. “I won’t bite.”

“I don’t want to,” he said. “But this used to be my room.”

“So?”

“I had to give it up so you could stay.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, and turned away, expecting him to leave. But he didn’t, he just stood in the doorway, openly taking an inventory of my belongings.

“Do you keep a diary?” he said, pointing to the pile of notebooks in my suitcase.

His impudence was annoying me, so I decided to annoy him back. “What music were you listening to?”

He reddened. “Why do you want to know?”

“I don’t,” I said. “I just didn’t pick you as the hair-metal type.”

He went back to his room and I heard no more from him. Before going to sleep, I wrote for a while in my journal, breaking in a new notebook because the old one was full. The house was quiet when I finished; I had stayed up later than I thought. The room was stuffy and I opened a window and leaned out. Down below, the back gardens of Ladbroke Grove stretched out in neat compartments, separated by brick walls and the occasional tree. In the neighboring garden, there was even a vegetable patch, and I marveled that anyone would want to eat whatever produce managed to grow there. I looked around the bare room, and my gaze kept returning to the closet. What if those tea chests really had belonged to my parents? What if they’d accidentally left something in there? The next thing I knew, I had flung open the wardrobe and was opening one of the boxes, convinced of the possibility.

The first yielded paint-splattered clothes and a jumble sale of unmatched cutlery, saucers, and cups. Pippa’s stuff. The second tea chest was heavier, and difficult to drag out of the cupboard. While I was shoving, one of its metal strips scraped loudly against the doorway, giving me quite a fright. I stopped to see if the noise had woken up anyone, and sure enough, a thumping noise came from Caleb’s room.

He went into the bathroom, and I leaped up to turn off the light in case he noticed I was still awake. The walls were thin, and I could hear a long stream of urine splashing into the bowl. He didn’t flush the toilet, but went back into his room and dragged what sounded like a heavy object in front of his door. His room fell quiet, and I turned my attention back to the tea chest. I was being nosy, but my urge to explore the tea chest and find something that belonged to my parents was stronger than my willpower to resist it. Before long, I’d prised open the lid.

Art materials took up the top half of the chest, a raggedy canvas, rolled up, and a box of crusted oil pastels. Underneath those was a spindly wooden mannequin with movable arms and legs, the kind we used to practice life drawing with. I’d been given one for my birthday once, when I was going through an art phase, and had experimented with it enthusiastically, bending it into different poses, only to discover that its flat wooden chest and mechanical joints were nothing like the human body.

When I reached into the box again, my hand jumped back from what it touched: a strange, hard object with a firm center and protruding stems, like a starfish or a giant tarantula made of wood. I stared into the chest, hardly breathing, but it was too dark by the wardrobe to see anything, so I brought over the bedside lamp and shone it into the box. There, in a black velvet glove, was a hand with long, thin fingers, about the same size as mine. I reached into the box and picked it up, noticing how little it weighed. The glove peeled off easily, and inside was a jointed wooden hand, also used for life drawing. We’d had one of those in the art room at school.

I put the hand back in its glove and held it as though we were shaking on a deal. The gesture was enough to bring back a sharp recollection of the past, and briefly the wooden hand turned into my hand in the cupboard, the one that had untied the bows on my dresses. I experienced then a strange jolt, not déjà vu but its opposite, a conviction that the way I had always remembered the hand might be wrong. What if I had seen this wooden hand at Pippa’s and had transferred it, in my imagination, to the boiler cupboard? The theory seemed plausible, but it didn’t resonate except in a cold, scientific way—and the hand in the cupboard had been neither of those things. It had been warm, as human and alive as I was. But how could that be?

One by one, I returned the objects to the tea chest and found that I was shaking. Discovering the mannequin hand had unnerved me to the core. Not just because it was creepy, but because it had rattled my sense of certainty that how I remembered the past was how it actually was. Now when I thought of the hand, my memories of it were unmoored.

I climbed into bed but saw that I hadn’t put away the tea chest. It was out in the middle of the room, and behind it, I had left the wardrobe doors wide open.

I had to put the tea chest away before morning, or risk Pippa seeing it, but there was something about the wardrobe that made me not want to go near it. The black space between the two open doors no longer seemed neutral, but pulsed with a presence that was strangely malevolent. Worse than that, it seemed to be exerting a magnetic pull.

Keeping one eye on the wardrobe, I hurried into the bathroom and closed the door behind me. What was I so afraid of? I tried to breathe it out, to talk myself down, and as I did so, I realized I was exhausted, worn out with anxiety—so much so that the floor between shower stall and sink looked inviting. When I lay down, I noticed how grubby it was, dirt crammed into the grooves between the tiles and tiny coils of hair behind the column that supported the sink. But with one glance I was able to take in the entire room, including both doors, firmly shut, and the thought of that was comfort enough to lull me into sleep.

I woke up when Caleb, in striped pajamas, walked into the bathroom, eyes sleepy, a hand clamped over his crotch. He didn’t see me until he had stumbled into my head. “Fuck!”

My embarrassment equaled his, and I rolled out of the way. “Sorry, I fell asleep.”

“In the bathroom?”

“I guess I must have been sleepwalking.” I had never sleepwalked in my life.

We returned to our rooms to regroup, then avoided each other for several days.

As a guest in Pippa’s house, I never quite felt sure where the boundaries were. She’d glibly told me on many occasions to make myself at home, but hadn’t meant it literally, as I discovered to my cost. The second or third morning I was there, I came downstairs to find a note pinned to the fridge telling me to help myself to food, except for the leftover lasagna, which was being saved for Caleb’s dinner. The note put me on edge, and from then on I was careful not to eat or drink too much, except for coffee, which I allowed myself almost unlimited quantities of. The disturbance in the wardrobe continued to bother me, and I spent two more fitful nights on the bathroom floor, and a third downstairs on the couch with the TV on low so as not to wake anyone. After a week of this, I was so utterly frazzled from accumulated sleep deprivation that I wasn’t sure if the disturbance had caused my insomnia or if it was the other way round. I didn’t mention anything to Pippa because I didn’t want her to think I was a nut job; if that happened, I’d be out on the street.

One night I got back from a walk in the park—I had been trying to wear myself out with exercise—to find Pippa wrestling with a basket of washing. She was trying to separate Caleb’s socks and underwear from Ari’s slightly bigger ones, and when she said, “It’s make your own dinner night, the servants are on strike,” I thought she meant I hadn’t been pulling my weight around the house.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Ari told me to help myself to baked beans, which he’d heated up in a pot on the stove. “Finish them up,” he said, handing me a bowl and pointing to a loaf of sliced bread for toasting. I ate in the living room, watching TV with Ari, and just as I was finishing, Alana finally returned one of the dozens of calls I had made to her mobile.

“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long,” she said. “I’ve been terrifically busy.”

“Me too,” I said, though the opposite was true. I tried to arrange another outing, but Alana was booked up, and sounded stressed. “Is everything okay?” I said. “Is it Steve?”

“Steve? No, he’s great.” She softened. “Actually, he’s lovely. He took me to Paris for the weekend.”

“Wow, he didn’t seem like the romantic type.”

“Exactly what type did he seem like,” she said, unexpectedly sharply, “to you?”

I had offended her, in a way that wasn’t easy to put right. “He seemed nice,” I said. “Really nice. A top bloke.”

“You never liked nice,” she said.

The edge was still in her voice, but as I opened my mouth to defend myself, Alana cut me off.

“I was going to get it over with the other night,” she went on. “But you were so drunk I didn’t see the point.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said, wincing. “I was excited about hanging out with you—I got carried away. There’s no one else I can talk to about how weird things have been lately—moving here, being unemployed, not having anywhere to live. I have terrible insomnia—”

She interrupted me. “Please don’t start.”

“Start what?”

“Telling me everything that’s wrong with your life. You’re just making it worse for yourself, and you have no idea how draining it is for everyone else.”

I was about to defend myself by explaining that my life really
was
messed up right now—that I wasn’t exaggerating—but stopped just in time. “We’ve been friends since we were fourteen,” I said. “You know I’m not always like this.”

She said nothing—passively disagreeing with me.

“You think I’ve always been draining?”

“You’ve always been intense,” she said. “Yes.”

In a matter of seconds, my closest girlhood friendship revised itself, then collapsed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She sighed, as though she couldn’t believe I didn’t already know. “Because I felt sorry for you.”

Sorry for me because my mother had cancer and was dying? Or because I was such a loser? I didn’t have the stomach to ask. “Well, you had me fooled,” I said, struggling to keep the hurt out of my voice.

“I better go,” said Alana, sounding relieved. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.”

I put the phone down. My jaw was stinging, about to crack. Pippa was heading toward me with a saucepan thrust out in front of her.

“You ate the last of the baked beans,” she said. “What’s Caleb going to have for dinner?”

I looked into the dirty saucepan. “Ari told me to eat them,” I said, backing away from her and trying to leave the room before I cried. Halfway up the first flight of stairs, I started to lose it, and by the time I had slammed the door to my room and flung myself on the bed, I was a puddle of childish sobs and dramatic, shivery wails.

Pippa had followed me up the stairs and started patting the bedclothes, trying to find me, but that only made me curl up in a ball and pull them more closely around myself. “It wasn’t my fault!” I cried out. “Leave me alone.”

“Listen to me, Suki,” said Pippa, whose persistence had finally gotten past the duvet. “I didn’t realize Ari told you to eat them.”

“Go away,” I said, covering my face.

“Come on, Suki, I’m just trying to help.”

“I don’t need your help,” I said, staying covered. I knew I was being ridiculous and immature, but it wasn’t enough to snap me out of it.

“You have to let someone in,” said Pippa.

Under the duvet, I froze, listening, cringing.

“I know you’ve had a hard life,” she continued. “But at some point you’ve just got to let it go and move on.”

I didn’t go downstairs again that night, and woke up the next morning on the floor of the attic bathroom with my legs stretched into the shower stall. A damp towel was wedged under my head and my shoulders were covered by a threadbare satin quilt, though I did not remember fetching either of them. When I pushed open Caleb’s door, his room was empty, his faded superhero bedspread in a heap on the floor. I looked in the mirror and hardly recognized the person there. Excessive crying had rinsed the color from my cheeks and left red rings around my eyes. Reluctantly I went downstairs, where Pippa was bustling in the kitchen, listening to a radio drama and cooking scrambled eggs. She said nothing about the night before and quickly turned down the radio when she saw me. “Sorry about the racket,” she said. “
The Archers Omnibus
is my only addiction. There’s coffee in the pot if you want some.”